Prisoner of Conscience

Senator John McCain (with his springer spaniel, Sam) takes a break from fishing the creek on his property in Arizona. Photograph by Jonas Karlsson.

Given his popular status as a maverick war hero, John McCain has a good shot at winning the 2008 presidential election—if he can get his party to nominate him. But one minute he’s toeing the conservative line (on gay marriage, say, or immigration) and the next he’s telling someone what he really thinks.

The audience is just the kind that makes John McCain feel most alive: a couple of thousand fresh-faced, corn-fed college kids still idealistic enough to believe an Honest-to-God American Hero who tells them that they can, and should, strive to serve a cause greater than their own self-interest. The setting is the Stephens Auditorium at Iowa State University, in Ames, and the questioner is Chris Matthews of MSNBC’s Hardball, who is pitching an hour’s worth of interrogatories to the American media’s favorite politician.

It is three weeks before midterm elections that will prove to be a decidedly mixed bag for McCain. His party will experience the electorate’s repudiation of the war in Iraq, which McCain has always supported, and at the same time the voters will repudiate the cozy and corrupt Washington culture as a whole, which McCain has always loathed. Matthews wants to know McCain’s views on the prevalence of gay people in all walks of life, a subject whose predicate is the scandal involving Representative Mark Foley and his come-hither instant-messaging with congressional pages. “Should gay marriage be allowed?,” Matthews asks.

“I think that gay marriage should be allowed, if there’s a ceremony kind of thing, if you want to call it that,” McCain answers, searching in vain for the less loaded phrases he knows are out there somewhere, such as “commitment ceremony” or “civil union.” “I don’t have any problem with that, but I do believe in preserving the sanctity of the union between man and woman.” It may not be clear just what McCain is trying to say, but it’s easy to see how his words could be skewed in a direction that the Republican right might not like at all.

Fast-forward to the next commercial break, during which McCain and Matthews reposition themselves from the stage to the auditorium floor to take questions from the students. McCain’s longtime political strategist, John Weaver, a lanky, laconic Texan, moves in to whisper some advice. The next question is about the pending federal farm bill, and McCain repeats his long-standing opposition to certain agricultural subsidies.

But then, out of nowhere, he adds, “Could I just mention one other thing? On the issue of the gay marriage, I believe if people want to have private ceremonies, that’s fine. I do not believe that gay marriages should be legal.” There: he said it, the right words for his right flank. It might seem that this audience, the sons and daughters of a socially conservative and culturally traditional bellwether state, would accept, if not approve of, what McCain has just declared. But they are the Wi-Fi wave of the future, and they can smell a pander bear as surely as they can a hog lot. They erupt in a chorus of deafening boos. “Obviously some disagreement with that last comment,” McCain says tightly. “Thank you. It’s nice to see you.”

Moments later, McCain remounts the stage for the program’s final segment, and he bores into Weaver, standing quietly in the wings, with a cold look that seems to mingle irritation at Weaver’s whispered advice with regret that he took it, and demands, almost hisses, “Did I fix it? Did I fix it?”

John McCain has spent this whole day, this whole year, these whole last six years, trying to “fix it,” trying to square the circle: that is, trying to make the maverick, freethinking impulses that first made him into a political star somehow compatible with the suck-it-up adherence to the orthodoxies required of a Republican presidential front-runner. McCain opposes a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, but supports a ballot measure that would do just that in his home state of Arizona. (It would fail in the midterm elections.) His short-term reward for the Hardball bunt on gay marriage? Boos from the audience and a headline on the Drudge Report, the right wing’s favorite screechy early-warning system, reading, mccain: gay marriage should be allowed? McCain needs to square that circle, and the hell of it is, he just can’t.

Back in the Straddle

But God knows McCain is trying. He began this mid-October day in Sioux City, appearing at a fund-raising Siouxland Breakfast for Representative Steve King, an immigration hard-liner. Recently he had called McCain an “amnesty mercenary” for daring to work with Senator Ted Kennedy on a compromise bill that would provide an eventual path to citizenship for the millions of immigrant workers already in the United States illegally. A day earlier, in Milwaukee, in front of an audience of more sympathetic businessmen, McCain had been asked how debate over the immigration bill was playing politically. “In the short term, it probably galvanizes our base,” he said. “In the long term, if you alienate the Hispanics, you’ll pay a heavy price.” Then he added, unable to help himself, “By the way, I think the fence is least effective. But I’ll build the goddamned fence if they want it.”

“I’m willing to negotiate anything,” McCain tells the breakfast crowd in Sioux City, explaining that there is no way the millions of illegal aliens now here can be sent back to their countries of origin. But he acknowledges that anything seen as amnesty for illegals is “totally unacceptable, particularly to our Republican base.” Later, McCain tells me that Congressman King “really knows this issue,” but he sounds as if he is trying to persuade himself as much as me.

A couple of hours later, McCain is in an S.U.V., bound for a tour of an ethanol plant in Nevada, Iowa, just north of Des Moines. He knows the visit will be a stretch: he opposes ethanol subsidies. Six years ago, he all but skipped the Iowa caucuses, in large part because his scornful opposition to ethanol was a nonstarter in a state where making corn into fuel is a big and lucrative business. He turns sardonic, asking the members of his small traveling party if they have had their morning glass of ethanol.

We barrel along past the flat fields. Chuck Larson, a bright young Iowa state senator, Iraq-war veteran, and former chairman of the state Republican Party, has signed on to shepherd McCain’s already well-organized presumptive 2008 campaign in Iowa. He asks McCain to make some calls to local party leaders. Juggling a sandwich and his cell phone in the front seat, McCain obliges. A couple of times, he gets voice mail and leaves an upbeat message, saying he is in the state and hopes to catch up soon.

Then McCain connects with Darrell Kearney, the conservative finance director of the Iowa Republican Party. Following Larson’s instructions, McCain tells Kearney, a former Steve Forbes supporter, that he’d love to go to the party’s next Lincoln Day dinner. But his words come out sounding as if he’s inviting himself, and the conversation seems strained. “I see,” McCain says. “Well, sounds exciting.” From my perch in the backseat, it doesn’t sound exciting at all. It sounds as if Kearney has ticked McCain off somehow. McCain flips the phone closed and tells Larson, “That’s enough!”

A few minutes pass and Larson asks how the conversation with Kearney went. “Fair,” McCain says, in a tone that invites no further discussion. “Fair.”

If this awkward little day of straddling feels familiar, it is because McCain has tried it before. In the 2000 campaign, he waded straight into the hottest controversy in South Carolina, not long before his crucial primary showdown with George W. Bush, by offering his unvarnished opinion on whether the Confederate battle flag—the Stars and Bars—should continue to fly over the state capitol. “As we all know, it’s a symbol of racism and slavery,” McCain said. After John Weaver and others did more than whisper in his ear, McCain took to reading aloud from a piece of paper with a statement that began, “As to how I view the flag, I understand both sides,” and went downhill from there.

For better or worse, McCain’s campaign was never the same again. And no one is more aware of this than John McCain himself. In Worth the Fighting For, his second memoir, written with his longtime aide Mark Salter in 2002, McCain reflected on what he had done:

By the time I was asked the question for the fourth or fifth time, I could have delivered the response from memory. But I persisted with the theatrics of unfolding the paper and reading it as if I were making a hostage statement. I wanted to telegraph to reporters that I really didn’t mean to suggest I supported flying the flag, but political imperatives required a little evasiveness on my part. I wanted them to think me still an honest man, who simply had to cut a corner a little here and there so that I could go on to be an honest president.

I think that made the offense worse. Acknowledging my dishonesty with a wink didn’t make it less a lie. It compounded the offense by revealing how willful it had been. You either have the guts to tell the truth or you don’t. You don’t get any dispensation for lying in a way that suggests your dishonesty.

As he embarks on his second presidential campaign, a campaign he once assumed he would never get the chance to run, there are many questions for John Sidney McCain III. Can he bank the fires of temperament that routinely put him atop insiders’ lists of the most difficult senators on Capitol Hill and become a unifying leader? Can he reconcile his unstinting support for the war in Iraq with his unsparing criticism of the Bush administration’s execution of it—and with the electorate’s evident yearning for a new approach? Would he be, at 72—more than two years older than the oldest man ever to assume the presidency, and more battered by old injuries than most men who have held it—too damned old to do the job?

But the biggest questions of all are whether, by forcing himself to become some kind of something he just isn’t, John McCain can win the presidency to begin with, and would he consider himself to be worthy of the honor if he did.

Some of McCain’s oldest friends and supporters confess that they don’t know the answers, but that they worry about the questions. Will McCain’s understandable effort to bend a little here and bow a little there—to placate the most conservative elements of his party, who play a disproportionate role in the nominating process—get him all twisted up before he ever gets to face the general electorate that polls suggest admires him so?

Torie Clarke first went to work as McCain’s press secretary when he was a freshman congressman, in 1983, and she remains a devoted friend. When I caught up with Clarke one afternoon just after the Republican rout last November, the conversation came round to the toll that the Confederate-flag controversy had taken on McCain’s political prospects and his psyche. “What you see now is variations on that,” Clarke says. “I think he’s a unique, special soul, and I worry about what life is going to be like for him the next couple of years.”

Dancing with Coyotes

In a thousand and one ways, John McCain remains irresistible—to anyone who ever screwed up in school, fell short of expectations, blew his stack, or gave his all to a losing cause. He is a born rebel, who once confessed that he had spent the bulk of his time at the Naval Academy “being made an example of, marching many miles of extra duty for poor grades, tardiness, messy quarters, slovenly appearance, sarcasm, and multiple other violations of Academy standards.” In his third year at Annapolis, he was so fed up he considered joining the French Foreign Legion, until, he said, he realized it required an enlistment of eight years. In prison in North Vietnam, where he spent more than five years after being shot down in 1967, he led a social-studies class for fellow inmates based on the subject he has always loved best—“The History of the World from the Beginning”—in an exercise to keep their sanity.

In an age of pre-fab, blow-dried, plasticized politicians, McCain remains palpably, pungently human. I saw him up close at intervals over a period of many weeks of campaigning last fall, often with almost unlimited access, and his preferred means of controlling his image is by abandoning all the typical modern efforts at control. He is the kind of person who comes alone, without a single aide or handler, to a dinner with a dozen New York Times editors and reporters, and tells stories of the long-ago days in flight school in Pensacola when he dated an exotic dancer known as “Marie, the Flame of Florida.” He unself-consciously nurses a vodka Gibson on the rocks in an age when Diet Coke is the safer choice.

In mixed company, he does not shrink from a good “goddamn” or two, and in male company, considerably coarser discourse comes easily to his lips (cocky jet jockey that he once was). He is a man of strong opinions, strongly expressed. “Most current fiction bores the shit out of me,” he says in a small plane somewhere over New England. In front of an audience of Republican worthies in Appleton, Wisconsin, he calls the leader of North Korea a “pip-squeak in platform shoes,” and in seconding my view that Islamabad has limited charms, he volunteers that the Pakistani capital “sucks.” At a nascar race in New Hampshire, he introduces Bobby Allison, “the greatest driver in the history of racing,” to one of the journalists following him that day, declaring, “This is Adam Nagourney, New York Times. They’re a Communist paper, but he’s O.K.” He introduces his friend Senator John Sununu, of New Hampshire, son of the famously bumptious former White House chief of staff, to a group of supporters by saying, “You can be very proud of him, and thank God he inherited his mother’s temperament.” To a gathering of businessmen he says, “I want to keep health-care costs down until I get sick, and then I don’t give a goddamn,” and to a group of college kids waiting to have their pictures taken with him, he growls good-naturedly, “All right, you little jerks!” On a charter jet above Iowa, he reads aloud a headline from USA Today: actor [wesley] snipes faces indictment on tax fraud charges, then mutters, “All our childhood heroes—shattered!”

Moments like these help explain why the constituency that McCain sometimes jokingly refers to as his base—the press—has not already tried to derail him by highlighting the politically expedient positioning that would be regarded as standard procedure for most elected officials but seems somehow so much worse in a man with such self-defined high standards. Together with Mark Salter, McCain has built a franchise of best-selling books out of his reputation for personal and public integrity. They bear titles such as Faith of My Fathers, Why Courage Matters, and Character Is Destiny, and make John F. Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage look like a mere Hallmark card. Yet another McCain book—this one on decision-making—is due out next fall, just as the campaign is likely to heat up in earnest.

But the plain truth is that the Straight Talk Express, Version 2.008, is often a far cry from the Magic Bus of 2000.

“Let me give you a little straight talk,” McCain tells the crowd at a house-party fund-raiser in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, for Senator John Thune, the Christian conservative and self-styled “servant leader” who defeated the Senate’s Democratic leader, Tom Daschle, in 2004. The minute Thune was elected, McCain says, he became an important figure in the Republican Party and the Senate.

That’s not straight talk. That’s partisan pap. Nor, presumably, was it straight talk last summer at an Aspen Institute discussion when McCain struggled to articulate his position on the teaching of intelligent design in public schools. At first, according to two people who were present, McCain said he believed that intelligent design, which proponents portray as a more intellectually respectable version of biblical creationism, should be taught in science classes. But then, in the face of intense skepticism from his listeners, he kept modifying his views—going into reverse evolution.

“Yes, he’s a social conservative, but his heart isn’t in this stuff,” one former aide told me, referring to McCain’s instinctual unwillingness to impose on others his personal views about issues such as religion, sexuality, and abortion. “But he has to pretend [that it is], and he’s not a good enough actor to pull it off. He just can’t fake it well enough.”

When it comes to the rough-and-tumble of practical politics, as opposed to battles over political principle, McCain’s apparent compromises are just as striking. Six years ago, McCain was livid when Sam and Charles Wyly, a pair of Texas businessmen friendly with the Bush campaign, spent $2.5 million on a nominally independent advertising effort attacking McCain. He called them “Wyly coyotes,” and implored an audience in Boston to “tell them to keep their dirty money in the state of Texas.” This time, McCain accepted money from the Wylys. The Wylys gave McCain’s Straight Talk America political-action committee at least $20,000, and together with other family members and friends they chaired a Dallas fund-raiser for the pac. (The Wyly money was later returned because the brothers have become the subject of a federal investigation.) In 2000, McCain denounced the Reverend Jerry Falwell—and others like him—as “agents of intolerance.” Last spring McCain gave the commencement address at Falwell’s Liberty University.

Two years ago, McCain was unsparing in his criticism of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, who slimed his friend and fellow Vietnam veteran John Kerry. Kerry felt close enough to McCain at the time to make multiple and serious inquiries about McCain’s interest in running for vice president on a national-unity ticket (and McCain basked in the courtship, even if he knew nothing could ever come of it). So the alacrity with which McCain joined in demanding an apology from Kerry—whose “botched joke” last fall about George Bush’s intellect came out as a slur against American troops in Iraq—was surprising, if not unseemly. Once upon a time, the two friends would have talked about the issue privately, and McCain might well have given Kerry his frank advice. As of mid-November, they had not spoken since McCain’s statement condemning Kerry’s “insensitive, ill-considered, and uninformed remarks”—which McCain once again read from a piece of paper, by the way. When I asked McCain if he thought Kerry was really trying to insult the troops, he answered only indirectly, and with some annoyance: “I accepted it when he said, ‘I botched a joke,’ O.K.?”

The battle between Bush and McCain in 2000 was bitter, with Bush supporters in South Carolina spreading rumors that McCain was insane and that he had fathered a black child. (McCain and his wife, Cindy, are the adoptive parents of a girl from Bangladesh.) Bush and McCain traded insults involving each other’s moral standing. A year later, with bad feeling still so high that strategist John Weaver had been virtually blackballed from working in Republican politics, Weaver went so far as to sound out Democratic Senate leaders about the possibility of having McCain caucus with them. This would have put the Senate, then divided 50–50, into Democratic control. Aides to two senior Senate Democrats say it was never clear how serious McCain himself was about the proposal, and any possibility that it might actually happen was short-circuited when another Republican, James Jeffords, of Vermont, made the move first, in 2001.

That was then, when memories of the Bush camp’s gruesome, dishonest attacks on McCain were still fresh. When I asked McCain how a rapprochement with Bush could ever have been achieved, he began by saying, “For 10 days I wallowed,” then made it clear that the best balm was his realization that the campaign had raised his stature. “We came out of the campaign, even though losing, enhanced nationally, with a lot of opportunities in the Senate legislatively, with more influence, and eventually, if necessary, to be able to go at it again.” Whatever the psychic or political specifics, the ultimate result was the celebrated McCain-Bush campaign hug of 2004, in which McCain found himself enveloped in a back-wrapping embrace and upside-the-head smooch. Since that moment McCain has borrowed from the Bush political playbook, aiming to make himself the prohibitive front-runner for the 2008 primaries, and happily snapping up former Bush aides and supporters from key states such as Iowa and New Hampshire, including Terry Nelson, an Iowan and political director of the 2004 Bush campaign. Nelson, now a private consultant in Washington, approved the most widely condemned negative ad of the 2006 midterms, produced by a quasi-independent group financed by the Republican National Committee and aimed at the black Democratic Senate candidate in Tennessee, Harold Ford Jr. In the ad, a sultry white actress says she had once met Mr. Ford at a “Playboy party,” then cradles her outstretched thumb and little finger to her ear and coos, “Harold, call me.” After the ad sparked an uproar it was taken off the air. Given the racially charged campaign of innuendo deployed against McCain by Bush supporters six years ago, and McCain’s outrage at such tactics, the McCain camp’s failure to condemn Nelson or the ad struck many as surprising. All John Weaver managed to say at the time was “We’re pleased the ad has been pulled down.” Nelson is set to manage McCain’s ’08 campaign.

The Old Man

In the two years leading up to the recent midterm election, McCain kept up a presidential-level schedule, with 346 appearances for Republican candidates and causes around the country. He traveled in small jets, sometimes alone, often with an aide or two; by early fall, his pac had already spent more than $1 million on air charters. On a rainy morning in mid-October, McCain, his longtime chief fund-raiser, Carla Eudy, and I are bound from Washington, D.C., to Milwaukee on a roomy Beechjet, all dark wood and soft leather, with snacks on demand. McCain, as is his habit, props his feet on the opposite seat and opens the newspapers.

“O.K., Carla, several drugs show promise for alzheimer’s,” he reads from The Wall Street Journal.

Eudy smiles. “I need that.”

Turning the page, McCain mutters, “It’s not you that needs it.”

A few minutes later, reading over his schedule for a long day ahead in Wisconsin, South Dakota, and Iowa, McCain murmurs, “We’re going from Joe Foss Field to Bud Day Field! I’m getting old. I knew both of them.”

Foss, for whom the airport in Sioux Falls is named, was the World War II flying ace and governor of South Dakota. Day became the nation’s most highly decorated military officer since Douglas MacArthur. He served in three wars, was one of McCain’s P.O.W. cellmates, and, as a civilian lawyer, handled McCain’s divorce from his first wife, Carol, in 1980; the airport in Day’s hometown of Sioux City, Iowa, is named for him. (McCain did not know General Billy Mitchell, the World War I aviator for whom the Milwaukee airport, where we’d be landing shortly, is named, but his grandfather did, and McCain wrote about him in Worth the Fighting For.)

At 70, McCain is both matter-of-fact and ruminative about his age. He may have DNA on his side. His father and grandfather, accomplished navy admirals, died prematurely after lives of hard drinking, hard living, and careers cut short, but his mother, Roberta, the daughter of a wealthy oil wildcatter from Southern California, is hale and unstoppable at 94. She spent this past fall driving herself around Europe, and because she was too old to rent a car, she simply bought herself a new Mercedes and hit the road. McCain gets laughs when he acknowledges that he is “as old as dirt, with more scars than Frankenstein”—but he always makes sure to mention his redoubtable mother.

At the end of his failed 2000 campaign, when he had not yet turned 64, McCain clearly assumed that he would be too old ever to run again. “To me, some of this last six months was to see ‘Does he still have the physical wherewithal to do this?,”’ Mark Salter acknowledges. “Evidently so, because no one staffer can do all the travel with him. Because we burn out too quick.”

Indeed, in two long stints on the road in September and October, McCain kept up a punishing pace. He is mentally sharp, verbally facile, and perpetually curious. (On one of our trips, he was rereading Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.) But he is visibly older, thinner, balder—and, yes, frailer—than he was just six years ago. Like his friend Bob Dole, he tries to minimize his disabilities, but they are serious. He suffered severe injuries when his plane was shot down over North Vietnam 40 years ago; his right knee was broken when his seat was ejected from the cockpit, and both arms were broken in the crash. These injuries were compounded by the profound abuse he endured during five and a half years in captivity.

McCain seldom talks about the details of his torture by the North Vietnamese, but he has written about them in clinical depth. Despite the injuries he had already suffered, upon capture he was promptly bayoneted in the ankle and then beaten senseless. The North Vietnamese never set either of his broken arms. The only treatment of his broken knee involved cutting all the ligaments and cartilage, so that he never had more than 5 to 10 percent flexion during the entire time he was in prison. In 1968 he was offered early release, and when he refused, because others had been there longer, his captors went at him again; he suffered cracked ribs, teeth broken off at the gum line, and torture with ropes that lashed his arms behind his back and that were progressively tightened all through the night. Ultimately he taped a coerced confession.

McCain’s right knee still has limited flexibility. Most of the time this is not too noticeable, but McCain mounts the steps onto planes with a herky-jerky gait. A climb up dozens of steps at the New Hampshire International Speedway, in Loudon, leaves him badly winded and sweating profusely. Because his broken arms were allowed to heal without ever being properly set, to this day McCain cannot raise his arms above his shoulders. He cannot attend to his own hair. An aide is often nearby with a comb and small can of hair spray.

McCain has difficulty putting on his suit jacket unassisted. Once, as we prepared to get out of a cramped airplane cabin in Burlington, Vermont, where McCain would be greeted by the governor, I turned my back for a moment, only to find him struggling. He could sense that his collar was all bunched up, and asked me matter-of-factly to help him straighten it out. I felt the pang that those around McCain feel whenever they realize the extent of his injuries. “You comb someone’s hair once,” his 2000 communications director, Dan Schnur, says, “and you never forget it.”

One of McCain’s aides tells me that two years ago, campaigning with McCain, George W. Bush asked him if the senator would like to work out with him. Told that McCain did not, could not, really “work out,” Bush replied, “What do you mean?”

Just after the Republican convention of 2000, a malignant melanoma was removed from the left side of McCain’s face, leaving a track of deep and angry red scars that are only now receding. Salter notes that if McCain’s campaign had not died six years ago McCain himself might have, because he wouldn’t have taken time out from the trail for the examination that produced the diagnosis. There has been no recurrence of the cancer, and McCain undergoes checkups every three months. At the slightest sign of direct sunlight he breaks out the baseball cap that is always kept at the ready, and slathers his face with so much sunblock that he looks like Marcel Marceau until his skin absorbs it.

And still McCain pushes himself, as if to combat any hint of diminished capacity. Last summer, he hiked the Grand Canyon rim to rim with his son, Jack, 20, now in his second year at Annapolis. He says the descent was torture on his knees, until a park ranger offered him some pills partway down.

“It was—am I saying this right?—I.V. Propen. The stuff’s a fucking miracle drug!” It doesn’t seem fair to tell him the drug is nothing more miraculous than Advil. McCain will repeat the ibuprofen story a time or two over the course of 48 hours, and he brings it up again when I see him about a month later.

McCain tells me that he counts on Cindy, to whom he has now been married for 25 years, and a close circle of longtime aides to tell him if they ever think he is losing a step. “They watch me very carefully,” he says. “They do. They keep an eye on it. And so I try to wear ’em down!” The sheer range in age of McCain’s seven children both calls attention to his own span of years and testifies to an unusual willingness to stay young. Besides Jack, they include his first wife’s sons by her first husband—Doug, 47, a pilot for American Airlines, and Andy, 44, who works for Cindy’s family company in Phoenix; McCain adopted both of them when they were children. Then there is Sidney, 40, his daughter with Carol, who is head of publicity at V2 Records; Meghan, 22, his eldest child with Cindy, now a senior at Columbia; Jimmy, 18, who has recently joined the Marine Corps; and Bridget, 15, a ninth-grader in Phoenix, the Bangladeshi girl the McCains adopted.

Most politicians repeat themselves, in part because they have their rap down, and in part because they see too many people to remember whom they’ve just seen, and McCain sees far, far more people than most. Older men often repeat their favorite stories, their best tales from the trenches, and McCain certainly repeats his. He is the Milton Berle of political humor, an unrepentant thief of bad gags from friends like Bob Dole and Alan Simpson, which he delivers deadpan and repeats at every stop.

Short-term exposure to McCain is bracing. Long-term exposure can be draining—makes you want to reach for the I.V. Propen. In our travels I spent a great deal of time with John McCain, on occasion just the two of us alone on a plane. Sometimes he would talk, and sometimes he’d stay silent. Often he’d punctuate the silence by saying something like “Do you know who Barry Goldwater’s best friend in the Senate was?” and I would answer something like “You told me yesterday that it was George McGovern.” McCain may sometimes slip into autopilot, but far more often he is focused intently, speaking to crowds large and small without a single note, addressing his questioners by name after one brief meeting, sizing up the situation in a room he has just entered and saying all the right things.

On what turned out to be a late-night flight from Joe Foss Field to Bud Day Field, McCain was waxing nostalgic about Ronald Reagan, whom he’d begun to admire when, in a North Vietnamese prison, he heard scraps of news about him, and whom he then got to know upon his release. Reagan helped inspire him to leave the navy and go into politics. McCain repeats former attorney general Ed Meese’s assertion that Reagan was never the same after he was severely wounded in the assassination attempt early in his first term, when he had just turned 70—McCain’s age as we speak. In hindsight, McCain says, Reagan surely exhibited some early signs of Alzheimer’s disease while still in the White House.

“I really shouldn’t tell you this,” McCain says. “I wouldn’t want to hurt anybody.” He goes on to describe being invited to dinner at the White House as a freshman congressman in 1983 and being seated at Reagan’s table, with a woman between them. Reagan told stories, grand stories, priceless stories of Old Hollywood, California politics. He was charming. Terrific. And four years later McCain found himself as a freshman senator back at a White House dinner in just the same arrangement. And Reagan told the same stories all over again. Suddenly, McCain stops and it’s as if he can read my mind.

“Now,” he says with a knowing air, “I tell the same stories all the time because I like them!”

Anger Management

‘My dear friends” are words McCain often uses when addressing big crowds. The greeting is expansive, antique, almost Victorian in its exaggerated politesse, and he sometimes stretches out the words as if to heighten the affection they convey. But when he says “My friend” to a single, luckless individual, the tone is terse and tight, and the meaning is anything but philanthropic. “My friend,” when uttered through clenched teeth and frozen smile, means McCain is ready to blow.

I’ve seen it happen again and again. To an inattentive freelance photographer who happened to get between him and a Sunday-afternoon house-party crowd in New Hampshire: “My friend, I like to see people when I’m talking to them.” To a nervous technician taking too long to rig a wireless transmitter on McCain’s back before a convocation at Boston College: “My friend, I will call you if I need you.” To Tim Russert on Meet the Press, after Russert has just told McCain that “to win the Republican primary you have to move to the right, and then, to win the general election, move back to the center”: “People know me too well, my friend. I’m not moving any way.”

McCain’s temperament may be the single most discussed element of his life and career. In high school, his nicknames were “Punk” and “McNasty,” and a survey of senior Capitol Hill staffers by Washingtonian magazine last summer ranked McCain second for “Hottest Temper” in the Senate, just behind the famously cranky 83-year-old Ted Stevens, of Alaska. (In fairness, it should be noted that Time magazine recently ranked McCain as one of the “10 best” senators.) Twenty-five years ago, a rival in McCain’s first congressional race called his first wife, Carol, to ask if she had any “negative material” on her ex-husband; McCain later told the man that if he ever did anything like that again “I will personally beat the shit out of you.”

More recently, just last winter, McCain wrote a stinging letter—and made it public—to Senator Barack Obama, the Illinois Democrat and rising star, for what amounted to little more than a misunderstanding over how Obama intended to proceed on the issue of lobbying reform—something that could have been cleared up with a chat in the corridor. Instead, McCain let loose, writing Obama the kind of missive, lacerating in its sarcasm, that Harry Truman used to compose late at night, but then prudently put in a drawer: “I would like to apologize to you for assuming that your private assurances to me regarding your desire to cooperate in our efforts to negotiate bipartisan lobbying reform legislation were sincere.… I’m embarrassed to admit that after all these years in politics I failed to interpret your previous assurances as typical rhetorical gloss routinely used in politics to make self-interested partisan posturing appear more noble.”

McCain’s aides say that McCain himself was the last to recognize that he had a reputation as a hothead, and used to rail at them in private every time a public commentator suggested he had a problem, shouting, “I do not have a temper. I just care passionately.”

Dan Schnur says he thinks the temper issue has faded: “He’s had six years of practice. In 1999 the attention crashed down on us like a ton of bricks. It came out of nowhere, and there was no preparation for it. He’s had that level of attention now for seven years, which makes me suspect that his temperament isn’t going to be nearly as much of an issue this time as last.

“But there’s a flip side to that,” Schnur adds. “He traveled on that bus for months with four or five reporters, and one of the nice things about starting slow is you get to try out your act Off Broadway. There’s no Off Broadway over the next two years. It’s all spotlight. An offhand remark in 1999 vanishes without a trace. In 2007 it’s on cable television for three weeks.”

One of McCain’s great strengths—his pugilistic tendency—is therefore also one of his great vulnerabilities. “There’s no bar fight he will walk away from,” John Weaver says, with a mixture of admiration and exasperation. A basic reality that makes the current Straight Talk Express seem at least an echo of the last one is that everything McCain says aboard it is on the record, day or night, unless he specifically says something is off the record, and he virtually never does.

From what I can tell, McCain’s temper is not so much worse than that of many other politicians I have known, from Rudy Giuliani to Bill Clinton. He wastes no time on niceties. Each time I met him for a trip or an interview, he barely bothered to shake my hand. He no longer calls reporters “liars” and “idiots,” as he once did, when he was starting out in politics in Arizona. “Do you think we could sit and watch the damned race for a minute?” he said to an eager aide who was escorting him around the owners’ box at the nascar track in New Hampshire to greet potential supporters when what he really wanted was to catch some of the action. Nothing pathological there.

What’s so different about—and potentially risky for—McCain is his perpetual willingness to think out loud, unplugged and unfiltered. On our way to Iowa for the Hardball taping in mid-October, McCain tells Chuck Larson and me that he assumes Chris Matthews will be tough on him for his recent dustup with Hillary Rodham Clinton, in which he suggested Bill Clinton’s mid-1990s horse-trading with North Korea paved the way for its recent nuclear tests. That prompted an unnamed Clinton adviser to tell Maureen Dowd of The New York Times that McCain had seemed to be doing the craven campaign-season bidding of the Bush administration and would end up “looking similar to the way he did on those captive tapes from Hanoi.” Senator Clinton called McCain on his cell phone to apologize.

“It was a very smart thing for her to call,” McCain says. “People underestimate her political intelligence and her antennae. She’s not her husband—no one’s her husband. But she’s good. And I like her. I know you’re not supposed to say that, but I do.” Both McCain’s umbrage and his magnanimity seem outsize for a man who once himself had to apologize to the Clintons for having made a cruel joke about their daughter.

On another flight, later that day, McCain reacts to the news that Harry Reid, the Senate Democratic leader, has used campaign money to contribute to the employees’ Christmas bonuses at the Ritz-Carlton in Washington, where Reid and his wife, Landra, own a condominium. In legal terms Reid’s move was dodgy at best. “Who knew he lived at the Ritz?,” McCain says. “Not bad for a boy from Searchlight, Nevada.” Then McCain—a former amateur boxer and inveterate gambler, whose wife is the wealthy heir to a beer-distributing franchise in Phoenix—goes on to recount how the McCains and the Reids once ran into one another in Las Vegas and went to a boxing match. It turned out that the Reids took free tickets, while the McCains paid.

“I wouldn’t say this publicly,” McCain tells the crowd at the private Thune fund-raiser, speaking of Reid, “but I came to the House with him in 1982 and he’s always been … ” Here McCain pauses—as if suddenly realizing that what he’s saying he is indeed saying publicly—and then goes on to finish the thought anyway: ” … a little on the edge.”

Late that night, on the flight to Sioux City, McCain falls to musing aloud about Colin Powell, his friend and recent stalwart ally in opposing the Bush administration’s efforts to end U.S. compliance with provisions of the Geneva Conventions. McCain says he wishes that Powell, from the start, had fought back harder against the Bush White House’s repeated efforts to undermine his effectiveness as secretary of state. It’s not that McCain and Powell always saw eye to eye on policy, one of McCain’s longtime aides tells me later; indeed, McCain was more hawkish than Powell on Iraq from the start. It’s that McCain wished Powell had spent more time traveling abroad, pressing aggressive efforts at public diplomacy, making his case out loud, rather than watching his bureaucratic back in Washington. “He could have prevailed at any time,” McCain says of Powell. Instead, on issue after issue, he was rolled by Don Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney and Cheney’s adroit and aggressive staff, whose power grew and grew.

“He’s a great American, a great soldier,” McCain says. “But he is also very cautious.” He adds, “I’m afraid history will judge him harshly.”

“Alone in the Room”

History may judge McCain harshly, too, on what he himself has identified as perhaps the biggest moral challenge presented by the war on terrorism: how the United States treats its enemy detainees. No one in American public life has greater personal or political standing to argue against the use of abusive interrogation techniques, and McCain has done so, at times powerfully, and almost without political support.

But in the middle of last fall’s election campaign, McCain accepted a messy compromise in the form of a Bush-backed bill, the Military Commissions Act, that would prevent foreign terrorist suspects held by the military from challenging their imprisonment through habeas corpus petitions in federal courts. Many legal scholars and at least one prominent Republican senator—Arlen Specter, of Pennsylvania, who voted for the bill anyway, saying the Supreme Court would eventually clean it up—believe the measure is patently unconstitutional. As enacted, it set up a system to detain, question, and try suspected foreign terrorists before military judges, with only the most limited oversight by federal courts.

Many had expected McCain to put up a stronger fight, even dig in his heels. When the Abu Ghraib prison-abuse scandal broke, in early 2004, McCain had excoriated Donald Rumsfeld at a Senate hearing for his inability to concisely state the chain of command over the interrogations at Abu Ghraib—and thus to accept his own, ultimate responsibility as secretary of defense. But as McCain’s election-year rapprochement with George Bush deepened, McCain did not press for the creation of an independent commission to investigate the abuses.

In 2005, McCain led a rebellion in the Senate that forced the Bush administration to accept an amendment banning “cruel, inhumane, or degrading treatment” of all prisoners in American custody. But when does treatment cross the threshold into the forbidden zone? The McCain amendment relied on an American constitutional standard of conduct that “shocks the conscience,” one that is open to some interpretation and legal dispute. (Shocks whose conscience?) But the amendment was not being passed in a vacuum—the United States, after all, is also a signatory to the Geneva Conventions, whose Common Article Three bars “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment.” So whatever protections the McCain amendment offered prisoners in American custody, Geneva could be seen as providing more, though the Bush administration was contending Geneva did not apply to what it called unlawful enemy combatants. Then, last summer, the Supreme Court ruled in the case of Hamdan v. Rumsfeld that Common Article Three applied to all aspects of the conflict with al-Qaeda, and to all prisoners in American custody.

This was a setback for the Bush administration, which wanted as much leeway as possible in its interrogation of prisoners. But the administration saw a way out. Why not enact legislation that interpreted Common Article Three’s “outrages upon personal dignity” as being defined by the words of the McCain amendment itself? On the surface, the move seemed almost tautological. But the consequence was in fact profound: remember, the McCain amendment was open to considerable interpretation, so if the Geneva Conventions were defined as its equivalent, they would be newly open to re-interpretation, too. The administration was proposing a legal flip. For half a century, the Geneva Conventions had been a powerful umbrella, sheltering all measures governing treatment of prisoners, including the McCain amendment. By itself, the McCain amendment would be a meager substitute.

For about 10 days in September, McCain went into full battle mode, joined by his Senate colleagues John Warner, of Virginia, and Lindsey Graham, of South Carolina, fellow veterans and experts on military policy. His rebellion threatened to deprive the White House of what it saw as a potent piece of election-year legislation, one that would remind voters of the administration’s determination to spare nothing in its prosecution of the war on terror. McCain was unmoved. “We’ve faced terrible enemies before, but the United States has always been better than our enemies,” he told a crowd at a New Hampshire house party during the height of the controversy.

McCain also knows, better than anyone else, how often torture fails to extract reliable information. After his repeated beatings in North Vietnam, he wrote, he realized that “every man has his breaking point. I had reached mine.” He gave his captors a confession under duress, referring to the “deeds of an air pirate,” a statement for which he finds it hard to forgive himself to this day. But when the North Vietnamese asked for the names of his flight squadron, McCain recited the names of the Green Bay Packers’ offensive line, knowing that false information would be sufficient to suspend the abuse.

McCain ultimately forced the administration to back down from its effort to slip out from under the plain words of the Geneva Conventions. But the final bill, which came to the floor last September, six weeks before the midterm elections, contained many other objectionable provisions, some of them grave, such as the ban on habeas corpus petitions. A person familiar with McCain’s thinking acknowledged that he had chosen not to take a stand on the question of habeas corpus rights—that is, the right of prisoners to contest their confinement in a civilian court—and that he was surprised by the furor the issue had generated. McCain ended up in a lose-lose situation: being castigated by much of the press and the legal community for being soft on habeas corpus, even as the Republican base went after him for his hard-line support of the Geneva Conventions. His office phones were virtually shut down by callers protesting his resistance to the White House’s original bill, and conservative talk-radio hosts inveighed against him.

Torie Clarke, who has often appeared on conservative talk radio on behalf of one Republican cause or another, says that the basic attitude of the hosts toward McCain is one of watchful wariness. They would tell her, off the air, “We’re being nice to McCain now because he’s being nice to the president. But we haven’t forgiven him.”

Tom Malinowski, Washington advocacy director for Human Rights Watch, who worked intensively with McCain and his staff during the drafting of the final 2006 legislation, says, “It’s a cloudy bill and he knows it. I’m not a huge fan of what happened in the end, but I do think he did lay everything on the line to prevent the administration from redefining the Geneva Conventions, and he succeeded. The problem was that once he succeeded he was no longer willing or able to essentially throw his body in front of this train over other issues”—like habeas corpus. “He did not have as much support from other senators on those issues,” Malinowski added. “He would have been essentially all alone in the room.”

And, yet, “alone in the room” is precisely what McCain has always insisted a president must be prepared to be. In the 1999 speech announcing his first presidential campaign, there was a dark and brooding passage that some advisers tried to get him to remove, on the ground that it was not in keeping with the upbeat tone of such an occasion. “When a president makes life and death decisions,” McCain said then, “he should draw strength and wisdom from broad and deep experience with the reasons for and the risks of committing our children to our defense. For no matter how many others are involved in the decision, the president is a lonely man in a dark room when the casualty reports come in.”

Can God Rescue Iraq?

On a mid-October morning President Bush signed the final bill on the handling of detainee interrogations and trials. John McCain skipped the ceremony and instead got back on the campaign trail, finding himself in a meeting room at the Milwaukee Athletic Club. By his own description he was “depressed.” His beloved Arizona Cardinals had lost the night before, in a game he stayed up too late watching; the Republicans’ prospects in the midterms were getting dimmer by the minute; and his audience of white-haired, ruddy-faced, blue-suited businessmen was begging him for wisdom about the Iraq war, which McCain has supported unwaveringly from the beginning, even as he has offered frequent, pointed, and well-informed criticism of its conduct by Rumsfeld and others. The Iraq war is a huge albatross for McCain, and it is by no means clear that he will be anything close to free of it by the time the presidential campaign begins in earnest. Asked whether, knowing all that is known now (no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, no effective Iraqi army), McCain would have still supported the invasion, his aides say he doesn’t view the question in such simple terms. Long before the war, they say, McCain believed that the status quo in Iraqi-American relations was unsustainable. Support for international sanctions against Saddam was collapsing. American pilots faced frequent attack in their overflights of the country to enforce the no-fly zones. And episodic internal Iraqi resistance against Saddam ended in crushing repression from Baghdad. “He stands by his support for doing something,” one aide said. But the aide went on to emphasize that, from the summer of 2003 on, McCain had been an aggressive advocate of sending more troops to keep the country from spiraling into insurgency or civil war. McCain had also been, more generally, an outspoken critic of the administration’s conduct of the war. If the situation continues to worsen, this aide said, and the Bush administration continues to make “wrong choices,” the reality could change. “If you knew we were going to lose, would you still be for it?” the aide asked. “That’s a different hypothetical question, that he doesn’t have to answer yet.” But McCain does have to answer the question: What do we do now? His own short-term prescription—more troops to stabilize the country, if that is even possible—has little public support. “The Iraq situation looks like we’re in a quagmire,” one man in Milwaukee says. Another adds, “It seems to be tipping.” A third asks, “What should the president be doing differently?”

McCain is subdued. Like the rest of official Washington, he has been waiting for the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group, the bipartisan commission on Iraq led by former secretary of state James Baker and former representative Lee Hamilton. He hopes the commission will point the way to some promising new direction, and he knows that, whatever the wise men say, he must refine his own approach to the war. But his remarks this morning are uninspired, even vapid. “The next few months will be critical,” he tells the businessmen, his critical faculties not as acute as they had been with me just a month earlier, in private, when he said, “A lot of people tell me that the next four months or so are critical … but I’d like to say that, two years ago, everyone said the next six months would be critical.”

Finally, a questioner lays it all on the line: “The war’s the big issue,” he says, adding, “Some kind of disengagement—it’s going to have to happen. It’s a big issue for you, for our party, in 24 months. It’s not that long a time.” McCain replies, “I do believe this issue isn’t going to be around in 2008. I think it’s going to either tip into civil war … ” He breaks off, as if not wanting to rehearse the handful of other unattractive possibilities. “Listen,” he says, “I believe in prayer. I pray every night.” And that’s where he leaves his discussion of the war this morning: at the kneeling rail.

On the way to our next stop, McCain tells me, “It’s just so hard for me to contemplate failure that I can’t make the next step.” And that afternoon, at a roundtable with more Republicans in Appleton, McCain gets testy with a woman who says that her grandson and granddaughter have served in Iraq and that things there are going better than the American media say.

“The situation is not improving,” McCain says shortly. “There’s no biased reporting in the number of casualties.”

A week after the November elections, I went to have another conversation with McCain, in his Senate office. I pressed him on the war. He maintained that deploying more American troops was “the only viable option,” but added, “There are no good options from where we are today.” He went on: “My difference with these people who are saying, ‘Threaten the Iraqis with leaving and then they’ll do more’—that assumes that they can or will do more. And there’s no way that you’re going to have any kind of stability without security. Political progress cannot take place unless you have the fundamental elements of a security situation. So, do I know it would be a tremendous strain on the army and Marine Corps? Absolutely. But I saw the kind of impact of a broken army, a defeated army and Marine Corps, after Vietnam. And I’d much rather have ’em take a strain and have some success than be defeated.”

He ticked off, and dismissed, other possible options.

“I know of no expert who believes there’d be anything but an enormous amount of bloodshed if you tried to divide them up into three states,” he said of an idea that has been occasionally floated. “Every partition in history has been a bloody mess. Removal into enclaves? We’re supposed to have our military enclaves while Al Jazeera is broadcasting images of people who’ve helped Americans being beheaded in the street in Baghdad? I don’t think so. A withdrawal to bases outside of Iraq, and go in if needed? How do we get in? You fly in in helicopters? Is that how you do it? Right now, a good portion of the military over there is used up or committed to just maintaining the supply train. So, suppose there’s an outbreak in Ramadi, and we’re supposed to go get it under control? How do you do that? It’s just almost nonsensical. Look what it took to get our initial invasion going.”

McCain says he understands how little public support there would be for more troops. “I read the polls all the time. But does that mean I’m not going to do what is morally right? I look you straight in the eye, my friend, and tell you: I want to be president of the United States. I don’t want to be president of the United States so badly that I’m going to do something that I know is not right for the security of this nation and the young men and women that are defending it. So, if this position makes me viewed as too militaristic, or unrealistic, or whatever it is, I will more than happily take those political consequences, because I’ll sleep a hell of a lot better.”

The report of the Iraq Study Group, issued in early December, has done little to alter McCain’s thinking. In public hearings he described aspects of the report’s approach as “dispiriting.” He disagrees robustly with its dismissal of a significant troop increase. He is concerned about the prospect of embedding more American troops with Iraqi units—which are deeply involved in sectarian violence—even as American combat brigades to protect them are drawn down. He is skeptical about bringing Iran and Syria into the conversation, and suspicious of the quid pro quos that this might entail. Clearly McCain will not be using the Iraq Study Group report either as a blueprint or as political cover. On a trip to Iraq in December, McCain reiterated his call for more U.S. troops.

When I asked how history will judge George Bush, McCain answered immediately, “I think it depends on the outcome of the Iraq war.” It goes without saying that his own shot at the White House—and his tenure as president if he runs and wins—may well depend on the very same thing.

The “Better Angels” and the Rat

The enduring question about John McCain is what, finally, he is willing to do to win. His favorite novel is For Whom the Bell Tolls, Hemingway’s story of an idealistic American, Robert Jordan, who goes to fight for the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War. Jordan is willing to risk his life but never his honor, and his dying meditation, that “the world is a fine place and worth the fighting for,” gave McCain’s second memoir its title.

But these days, McCain often seems to think and behave like the central character of a more contemporary political novel, Joe Klein’s Primary Colors, in which Governor Jack Stanton, Klein’s talented but flawed Clinton-esque hero, begs an aide disillusioned by his compromises to stick with him. “You don’t think Abraham Lincoln was a whore before he was a president?,” Stanton asks. “He had to tell his little stories and smile his shit-eating, backcountry grin. He did it all just so he’d get the opportunity, one day, to stand in front of the nation and appeal to ‘the better angels of our nature.’ That’s when the bullshit stops. And that’s what this is all about.”

McCain can be cold-eyed. Torie Clarke recalls how she once played a game with him in which he had to name his favorite animal. His favorite animal, he said, was the rat, “because they’re cunning and they eat well.” But McCain also holds a far loftier view of himself and his obligations than most politicians would dream of articulating. He likes not only to be liked, but to be perceived as a man of high principle.

I asked him once what standard of behavior he should be held to, the “normal” politician’s or his own. “Well, I hope you’ll hold me to no standard,” he joked, before saying he believes that much of the press—and, by extension, the public—will say, “McCain: we like him, we think he’s a good guy, we think he’s honest, but we’d better make sure that we give him a very thorough scrubbing.”

At the freshman convocation at Boston College this fall, McCain concluded his talk with a powerful warning about the costs of compromising one’s highest ideals.

“Very far from here and long ago, I served with men of extraordinary character, honorable men, strong, principled, wise, compassionate, and loving men,” McCain told the students. “Better men than I, in more ways than I can number.… Some of them were beaten terribly, and worse. Some were killed.… Most often, they were tortured to compel them to make statements criticizing our country and the cause we had been asked to serve. Many times, their captors would briefly suspend the torture and try to persuade them to make a statement by promising that no one would hear what they said, or know that they had sacrificed their convictions. Just say it and we will spare you any more pain, they promised, and no one, no one, will know. But the men I had the honor of serving with always had the same response, ‘I will know. I will know.’

“I wish that you always hear the voice in your own heart, when you face hard decisions in your life, to hear it say to you, again and again, until it drowns out every other thought: ‘I will know. I will know. I will know.’ ”

McCain’s own compromises in pursuit of the presidency may be necessary, even justified. And they may, in fact, pave his way to victory in the Republican primaries, and perhaps to the White House itself. But even if no one calls him out, and the public plays along, McCain may pay an awful price. Because, whatever happens, he will know. He will know. He will know.